“I carried shame from generations I had never even met. Generations who had shame imposed on them for nothing more than being the wrong people at the wrong time. Wrong stories, wrong skin. I have lived a life carrying things that were never mine to carry in the first place.”

“If the hill is civil rights, if the hill is justice, if the hill is moral goodness or righteousness or whatever you personally call that, then the child that is the United States started pulling the sled up the hill in the late eighteenth century. And we didn’t start near the top.”